


Head Case

by ErrantNight



Category: Grim Tales (Video Games)
Genre: Amnesia, Dark Magic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:34:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22737295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErrantNight/pseuds/ErrantNight
Summary: Richard Gray finds that being dead has some advantages when you're trying to figure out why you decided to become a monster in life. Takes place post White Lady
Comments: 9
Kudos: 8





	Head Case

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a really obscure fandom (hidden object puzzle games)and I probably won't get much feedback on this. I'll put a really rough summary of what's going on in the games at the bottom notes if anyone wants to just see that and still read this and see what it's all about. If you don't want to play the games and just want to find out what happens there are good explanations on the fandom wiki and also there are let's plays on youtube!!

There was something comforting about being dead, at least for having time to yourself to sit around and think about things. Richard Gray had a number of things to think about and had spent a very long time pointedly not doing so. Particularly during the span of time that he’d spend doing the most horrific things imaginable and looking back to realize he didn’t even know why.

He’d committed unspeakable crimes, and why? Immortality? Well, he had that in a way now. Did he enjoy it? Well, yes, he couldn’t lie to himself that it was fun being a ghost and that there was a whole world behind the veil that existed between life and death. He couldn’t even say he felt particularly bad about gifting or cursing his daughter with youth and life… really it was the least he could do.

There was no physical pain in the afterlife, but mental pain was something altogether different. He was trying to decipher his own memories, looking for motives and plots he couldn’t quite remember.

As it turned out quite a number of dark sorcerers became obsessed with eternal life, and this desire seemed to erode something inside of them - particularly in whatever center of their mind and soul inhibitions and morality dwelt. The burning need for more power, more knowledge, more and more and more. It chipped away at them until they went completely insane and had no compunctions about the horrific things they decided were worth doing in order to achieve it.

He didn’t shy away from what he’d done, couldn’t say “Oh, it wasn’t my fault, the madness…” 

He’d watched Star Wars - not that he’d had time or inclination to see any films in his life - and he wondered if the ‘dark side’ wasn’t just something invented for fiction. A semi-sentient force that insidiously corrupted someone who had been good into a complete monster who murdered children… It was still his own fault, his own and those movie characters. He’d made a choice, even if he couldn’t remember when or why he’d done so.

There was a huge empty stretch he couldn’t remember, a misty vague childhood and an entirely blank decade of young adulthood. He remembered staring in the mirror one day, scrapes and burns on his body and arcane runes etched deep into his face and hands and carved across his chest just over his heart. 

His memory had been faulty for awhile after, his memory had gaps here and there seemingly spontaneously, but something had happened when he was barely twenty years old that had defined the rest of his life and he couldn’t fucking remember.

The runes carved into his skull flared bright blue and then ebbed away as he left it, shifting through the aetherial plane until he stood in the Evergreen mansion just beside his grandson’s bed. The boy looked ridiculously innocent, and well he was wasn’t he? He stared at the rising and falling chest for a long moment, wondering if he’d ever done this before with his children. He didn’t think he had. Shaking that off, he misted through the door and began to go deeper into the places even Anna hadn’t discovered in her investigation. Rooms that had been bricked up completely and not touched since before she’d been born. 

Things hidden by dark magic as well as simple masonry.

He wondered why Gabriel had done this, because it couldn’t have been anyone else. His eyes fell again on what he’d wandered across while attempting to find whatever he could to help his daughter - old photographs scattered and covered in dust atop a desk that looked as though it had been stabbed over and over in a frenzy by the knife blade broken and embedded into its surface.

He recognized himself in them, and what had been Gabriel before he’d gone mad, and others he couldn’t remember. It took him days to go through everything, slipping back once in awhile to see if Anna needed him. She didn’t, although she seemed to be touchingly concerned that he kept vanishing for such long periods.

He didn’t fucking deserve to have her as his child. She’d never forgive him for what he’d done, but she also didn’t pick and rant about it and had listened when he’d rambled about what he’d done and the history of the family and seemed to accept that he was telling the truth that he simply didn’t *know* why he’d done things. 

The dead didn’t feel pain but he could imagine the headache he’d have right now trying to focus on the information he’d uncovered. Gabriel had been a prolific writer of his own thoughts and indeed had kept everything he’d ever written and enshrined it as though it were the words of the god he seemed to see himself as.

Gabriel had been his friend.

He and Gabriel had studied magic together.

He had, apparently, been a noble child who wanted to see the good in everyone.

Gabriel had… not. Or he probably had until he’d begun to give in to ‘the dark side’ as Richard had taken to calling it now. It was frightening how this bright young man had been so completely twisted over the course of a year or so, entries changing from ‘I love magic, I want to do good things in the world, I love my friends,’ to ‘I hate everything, people who want to do good in the world are foolish and naive, I hate having to pretend I love anyone’. 

For as long as he could remember that was how he’d felt as well. He knew he must have loved his wife, she was too good to have married him for any other reason, but he’d betrayed that love and used it to his own ends.

He flinched back from his own memories, of what he’d seen as betrayal when she’d left and taken Anna and Luisa away with her. As though she should have understood that he had to sacrifice their children to achieve his goals - after all he was the only person in the world who mattered. That was how he’d felt - that anything he did was justified and that everyone around him should mold themselves to help him achieve his desires.

The pages that he needed to find were shredded into tiny pieces amongst the photos - one corner at the bottom of the deep stab wound in the wood beneath the knife. The last entries that involved himself in Gabriel’s journal and the only pages that had been ripped out and not preserved like holy script. 

He didn’t even remember who Alessia was, that he’d loved her, that he’d given up everything he believed in for one wild moment of desperation and dipped his hands into the festering ichor that was dark magic to bring her back. That he’d willingly given up his memories of doing so for the opportunity.

He wished he could be a poltergeist, could whip up a mad wind and destroy this stupid archive to a madman who had also sacrificed his own children and his wife for his own benefit. The most he could do was focus his energy enough to flip the table, scattering papers and debris all across the floor and burn the reassembled pages to a fine ash with cold blue fire.

The runes on his skull glowed a faint weak blue as he slipped back inside of it, energy depleted by his tantrum. 

Somehow he’d regain his memories.

Somehow he would make amends.

He’d been trying to help his family in his own awkward way but he didn’t think it would ever be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> So these games can be hard to figure out at times because you literally need a family tree to remember who people are. The main character, Anna Gray, is a detective (you're almost always some kind of cop or private eye in this genre of games) and she spends a lot of time trying to get her family out of the shit. She has a magical power that's a combination of Psychometry and Time Travel - she can touch a specific sort of thing and go back into the past short term to try and fix or prevent things from happening. 
> 
> Her family is traditionally steeped in the occult and has allies and enemies, a lot of enemies... and her own father was a horrifically evil dark wizard - Richard Gray. Spoilers here but hey you came down to look anyway right? He murdered his little twin girls as children and then planned to murder Anna and her twin Luisa as adults as part of the same ritual. It never explains why or what the point was but later on in the bonus game of White Lady you discover he was actually a very nice and kind young man and was tricked into performing dark magic and then had his memory erased. It seems in this world that dark magic twists you really fast and dramatically. So he has a serious case of amnesia and can tell there is something wrong with him but then just gave in and went super evil.
> 
> Later on in the games he comes back as a ghost and then is sealed in a skull that Anna carries around and Richard helps her. He seems to be healing from the dark magic and his appearance becomes less and less corrupted over time and he's more 'human' and friendly. There's not a lot of exposition in these games for why this is so I feel it's very open to interpretation and I like that a lot. 
> 
> I'm so very shocked that there are almost no fanfics about this game series. I highly recommend them and you can honestly find most of them online if you don't want to get them on Big Fish. The problem with buying them all is the collectors editions are $20 and you really have to play the bonus chapters that come with those to even know what all is happening.


End file.
